A freak flag flies at half-mast

David Crosby, it seemed, spent the last decade on some sort of national apology tour, expressing his endless regrets for how his hardcore drug habits sabotaged CSN, along with several personal relationships, for being a smug douchebag when he was with the Byrds, for saying things about Neil Young’s then-girlfriend Darryl Hannah. It’s a long list.

It’s tough to make excuses for who you are and while Crosby could be an egotistical, unrepentant hedonist with no filter, he was one of the great singer-songwriters of the era and somewhat of an icon. Possessing a voice that blended well with others, but could soar on its own, his singing was effortless, in the same vein as a Willie Nelson. Remarkably, all those years of abuse had no ill effect on his voice. We saw him perform at a solo show in 2015, and his 73-year-old voice had held up incredibly well.

Also on stage that night were his uncensored opinions, as he trashed Kanye West, “He can’t write, sing or play” and Trump, “an intelligence-free zone.”

Like his personal life, Crosby’s songs had a freeform feel. Everybody’s Been Burned and Eight Miles High, for which he’s listed as a co-writer, were Byrds songs that didn’t follow any rock songwriting conventions. Same with Déjà Vu and much of the current stuff he’s cut over the past couple of decades. Miles Davis thought enough of Guinnevere to cover it.

As for his status as an icon, Dennis Hopper claimed to base his character in Easy Rider on Crosby. In the anthemic Almost Cut My Hair, Crosby offered up these two deathless lines: “I feel like letting my freak flag fly” and “It increases my paranoia/Like looking in my mirror and seeing a police car” – who hasn’t had that feeling driving down the highway, stoned or not? Smart-ass 1980s punk rockers The Dead Milkmen made Crosby the punchline of The Thing That Only Ate Hippies – it eats Stills and Nash but spits out Crosby. Millennials, the type who tend to revere jam bands, saw him as a benevolent but toasted Grandpa Walton. The Croz.

Two other thoughts.

Crosby’s father Floyd was a Hollywood cinematographer and while he worked on High Noon and won an Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1931, by the mid-1960s he was working mostly B-movies, including nearly all the Annette and Frankie “beach” flicks.

How much of Jim Morrison’s animus was fueled by his father, a career Navy officer and in command at the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, an incident which lit the fuse for the Vietnam War? How similarly strange for Crosby – although admittedly not on the same level – to be working in an L.A. recording studio on Eight Miles High while his father was a few miles away figuring the best way to light How to Stuff A Wild Bikini?

Secondly, after he was released from a Texas prison in 1986 on narcotics and weapons charges, and kicked the hard stuff, Crosby went on a creative tear, a second wind that had him performing with bands of much younger musicians, releasing four albums of mostly new material, collaborating with such unlikely bedfellows as David Gilmour and Donald Fagan, touring several times with Stephen, Graham and Neil – at least before the latter two stopped speaking with him – and being fairly active, and filter-free, on Twitter. 

He may have been in a rush, living on somewhat borrowed time with a transplanted liver and other health problems, to redeem himself for his past sins and to recapture a talent that appeared to be all but lost. His may be one of the great comeback stories ever. 

Davids Gilmour, Bowie and Crosby